I'm done with GRRM's first punishment and my review of Peter S. Beagle's A Fine and Private Place (Canada, USA, Europe) should make its appearance in the next couple of days. It's a good read, by the way, one that should satisfy most readers. I'm currently reading the winner of our last survey, Kay Kenyon's City Without End (Canada, USA, Europe), which is interesting thus far.

And you can now pick what ARC I'll be checking out next! Here are the candidates:

When you have to kill the same terrorist twice in one week there's either something wrong with your world or something wrong with your skills... and there's nothing wrong with Joe Ledger's skills. And that's both a good, and a bad thing. It's good because he's a Baltimore detective that has just been secretly recruited by the government to lead a new taskforce created to deal with the problems that Homeland Security can't handle. This rapid response group is called the Department of Military Sciences or the DMS for short. It's bad because his first mission is to help stop a group of terrorists from releasing a dreadful bio-weapon that can turn ordinary people into zombies. The fate of the world hangs in the balance....

When the body of a murdered woman is found in the extraordinary, decaying city of Beszel, somewhere at the edge of Europe, it looks like a routine case for Inspector Tyador Borlú of the Extreme Crime Squad. But as he probes, the evidence begins to point to conspiracies far stranger, and more deadly, than anything he could have imagined. Soon his work puts him and those he cares for in danger.

Borlú must travel to the only metropolis on Earth as strange as his own, across a border like no other. It is a journey as psychic as it is physical, a shift in perception, a seeing of the unseen, a journey to Beszel’s equal, rival, and intimate neighbor, the rich and vibrant city of Ul Qoma.

When a man is tired of London he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford? Samuel Johnson.

In fact, Dr Johnson was only half right. There is in London much more than life - there is power. It ebbs and flows with the rhythms of the city, makes runes from the alignments of ancient streets and hums with the rattle of trains and buses; it waxes and wanes with the patterns of the business day. It is a new kind of magic: urban magic. Enter a London where magicians ride the Last Train, implore favours of The Beggar King and interpret the insane wisdom of The Bag Lady. Enter a London where beings of power soar with the pigeons and scrabble with the rats, and seek insight in the half-whispered madness of the blue electric angels. Enter the London of Matthew Swift, where rival sorcerers, hidden in plain sight, do battle for the very soul of the city ...

Lushly written with rich and vivid characters, Santa Olivia is Jacqueline Carey's take on comic book superheroes and the classic werewolf myth.

Loup Garron was born and raised in Santa Olivia, an isolated, disenfranchised town next to a US military base inside a DMZ buffer zone between Texas and Mexico. A fugitive "Wolf-Man" who had a love affair with a local woman, Loup's father was one of a group of men genetically-manipulated and used by the US government as a weapon. The "Wolf-Men" were engineered to have superhuman strength, speed, sensory capability, stamina, and a total lack of fear, and Loup, named for and sharing her father's wolf-like qualities, is marked as an outsider.

After her mother dies, Loup goes to live among the misfit orphans at the parish church, where they seethe from the injustices visited upon the locals by the soldiers. Eventually, the orphans find an outlet for their frustrations: They form a vigilante group to support Loup Garron who, costumed as their patron saint, Santa Olivia, uses her special abilities to avenge the town.

Aware that she could lose her freedom, and possibly her life, Loup is determined to fight to redress the wrongs her community has suffered. And like the reincarnation of their patron saint, she will bring hope to all of Santa Olivia.

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commentaires:

I will vote for the only book on your list that I am very much looking forward to myself and that I have pre-ordered: The City & The City. I love China Miéville so much, and every single one of his books that i've read has impressed me to no end.

I tried to find an e-mail address to contact you, but didn't find one. (Can't blame you--what if one million people e-mailed you?) However, I was wondering how I could ask if you'd consider reviewing my fantasy novel, Magic, Mensa and Mayhem. It comes out in March and I'm blog touring it in April. It's a comedy/mystery (think Sam Spade meets Myth, Inc.) and might be a fun change of pace.

Seriously, the zombie book is fun, a solid popcorn read, but nothing more. I read it only a couple of months ago and can't even remember the main character's name.

But THE CITY AND THE CITY, even if it is rubbish, is one of the most significant genre books released this year by one of the most interesting writers in the field. Looks like the voters agree it's a no-brainer ;-)